I’m trucking up the Northway this morning to speak at NYSUT’s Community College Conference on the “Positives and Pitfall of Social Networking.” My slides are posted here (CC-Saratoga-Handout), plus I found a few great resources – here are the links:

Like all search engines, Google is a reflection of the content and information publicly available on the web. Search engines do not have the ability to remove content directly from the web, so removing search results from Google or another search engine leaves the underlying content unaffected. If you want to remove something from the web, you should contact the webmaster of the site and ask him or her to make a change. Once the content has been removed and Google’s search engine crawl has visited the page again, the information will no longer appear in Google’s search results. If you have an urgent removal request, you can also visit our help page for more information.

In other words, ask the person who posted it to take it down(Wow – why didn’t I think of that)…

If you’re not the webmaster:
This will prove a bit more difficult as Google doesn’t have the right to censor results based on whoever asks them to. Thankfully, we’re doubtful many of you are major celebrities who have your paparazzi photos popping up all over Google Image search results so this should be a bit easier. What you’ll need to do first is contact the webmaster. Google has provided some helpful hints as to how to go about doing that . Explain to them why you’d like the image taken down and offer a substitute one if they’re using your photo for reasonable purpose like a news article. Once they take the image down you will have to repeat the same final step as before by taking the URL of the image and pasting it in that Content Removal page.

So there is the no-so-great answer. It seems the best offense is a good defense – try to make sure nothing bad about you gets posted in the first place.

I’m heading out for Carmel to speak with members of the Carmel Teachers Association about Social Networking. It’s a bit early, but then again I’m sure my audience is already up as well! Here is a Carmel-Handouts in case you want to follow along during today’s sessions. Only thing left…Taconic or Thruway?

It was great to get out of the office and meet with some of NYSUT’s wonderful retirees today. The questions were excellent and I had a good time. As promised, click here for the ED52 Retiree Presentation. See you on the internet!

Another week, another ED Meeting. Thanks to this week’s hosts Ken Ulric (ED17) and Barbara Hafner (ED18) – and a shout out to Selina Durio (At-Large Director). The questions were great – and you guys really kept me jumping. I really appreciate the welcome reception and hope the material was useful. Here is a link to the PowerPoints: ED17-ED18-Presentation. If you want the PowerPoint version so you can have the slides and the notes – email me at dadkins@nysutmail.org.

There was a great recommendation for a site to allow safe texting to students, check out http://remind101.com/.

Check out the links in the upper-right corner for how to set Facebook privacy settings. Thanks again – feel free to leave comments below!

I had the privilege of spending my evening in Mt. Kisco tonight with some of NYSUT’s awesome Local Presidents. Thanks to Karen Magee (ED 15 Director) for the invite and also Pat Puleo (NYSUT At-Large Director) for hosting. I apologize for going over my allotted time (Pallotta time?) but I hope I got everyone’s questions answered.

I’ve been procrastinating for a while. I wanted to write about the cycle of the next new things (technology) that will revolutionize learning in the classroom. There has been a constant march of “breakthroughs” such as laserdiscs, laptops, palm pilots, and lately iPads and tablets – all which promised to revolutionize learning. My procrastinating has paid off – someone else wrote a great column on this very topic!

Michael Hiltzik recalls a quote: “Books will soon be obsolete in the schools…. Our school system will be completely changed in 10 years.” The kicker – it was Thomas Edison who said it in 1913 – and the technology he was speaking about was movies!

A few of Mr. Hiltzik’s nuggets of wisdom:

“The push for advanced technology in the schoolroom then and now was driven by commercial, not pedagogical, considerations.”

“It’s great to suggest that every student should be equipped with a laptop or given 24/7 access to Wi-Fi, but shouldn’t our federal bureaucrats figure out how to stem the tidal wave of layoffs in the teaching ranks and unrelenting cutbacks in school programs and maintenance budgets first? School districts can’t afford to buy enough textbooks for their pupils, but they’re supposed to equip every one of them with a $500 iPad?

He also quotes Richard Clark, director of the Center for Cognitive Technology at USC;

“The media you use make no difference at all to learning, Not one dang bit. And the evidence has been around for more than 50 years.”

My point is simple – this is a great column – one that we should put in front of our school boards and administrators. I’ll leave you with one more quote about technology from the column.

… it distracts from and sucks money away from the most important goal, which is maintaining good teaching practices and employing good teachers in the classroom.